tagged news

The Khronos Group announces the release of a geometry compression extension to glTF 2.0 using Google Draco technology to significantly reduce the size of glTF models and scenes. The Khronos glTF Draco extension specification is accompanied by optimized, open source compression and decompression libraries on the Draco GitHub site to enable the rapid deployment of glTF compressed geometry into tools, engines, applications, and browsers everywhere.

The Khronos™ Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies creating advanced acceleration standards, announces the release of a geometry compression extension to glTF™ 2.0 using Google Draco technology to significantly reduce the size of glTF models and scenes. The Khronos glTF Draco extension specification is accompanied by optimized, open source compression and decompression libraries on the Draco GitHub site to enable the rapid deployment of glTF compressed geometry into tools, engines, applications, and browsers everywhere.

The Khronos Neural Network Exchange Format, among other technologies, go a long way to enable highly optimized implementations of inference for systems trained on a range of systems. Explains Chris Rowen, CEO for Babblabs, "This is extremely valuable to opening up the path to exploit optimized high-volume inference engines in phones, cars, cameras and other IoT devices. This higher-level robust set of interfaces breaks the tyranny of instruction set compatibility as a standard for exchange and allows for greater levels of re-optimization as the inference execution hardware evolves over time." Read more on the Semiconductor Engineering blog.

Standards make life easier, and we depend on them for more than we might realize — from knowing exactly how to drive any car, to knowing how to get hot or cold water from a faucet. Balancing the need for a stable standard, while at the same time allowing technology advances to be rapidly exploited, is a big part of what Khronos does. There are two ways a Khronos standard can be extended: Vendor Extensions and Khronos Extensions. Read on to learn how both of these work within Khronos.

This podcast episode of “The Interview” with The Next Platform focuses on an effort to standardize key neural network features to make development and innovation easier and more productive. To explore this topic, The Next Platform was joined by Neil Trevett. Listen to the podcast and read the write up.

NNEF and ONNX are two similar open formats to represent and interchange neural networks among deep learning frameworks and inference engines. At the core, both formats are based on a collection of often used operations from which networks can be built. Because of the similar goals of ONNX and NNEF, we often get asked for insights into what the differences are between the two. Read the Khronos blog to learn more about the similarities and differences between NNEF and ONNX.

Khronos member Renesas Electronics has outlined their plans for ADAS and self-driving cars. Renesas is working with Codeplay Software Ltd., experts in high-performance compilers and software optimization for multi-core processing. The collaboration allows programs already written in CUDA for Nvidia’s SoC to be brought to R-Car SoCs, using Codeplay’s OpenCL open standard-based software framework. The framework, first made available on R-Car H3 as a proof of concept, is now coming to the R-Car V3M and other R-Car SoCs of Renesas’ autonomous platform for both ADAS and automated driving.

Khronos announced the conformance program for OpenGL 4.6 and Intel has successfully passed conformance tests for its GPU models for the Mesa Linux driver. For specifics on the conformant hardware you can check the list of conformant OpenGL products at the Khronos website. Learn more about these drivers and the OpenGL conformance tests and why they are important to you.

The Khronos™ Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies creating advanced acceleration standards, announces the launch of the OpenGL® 4.6 Adopters Program to enable implementations to become officially conformant to the latest generation OpenGL specification. The significantly enhanced OpenGL 4.6 Conformance Test Suite used in the Adopters Program has been released in open source on GitHub to enable industry participation in testing and ongoing conformance test suite improvements. General information on Khronos Adopters Programs can be found here.

The Khronos™ Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies creating advanced acceleration standards, announces the launch of the OpenGL® 4.6 Adopters Program to enable implementations to become officially conformant to the latest generation OpenGL specification. The significantly enhanced OpenGL 4.6 Conformance Test Suite used in the Adopters Program has been released in open source on GitHub to enable industry participation in testing and ongoing conformance test suite improvements. General information on Khronos Adopters Programs can be found here.

Unreal Engine 4.19 preview has a experimental importer for glTF. This is an open format, that, once final, should work better than FBX, and actually work great with Blender. The Unreal Engine forums mentions that "Right now its much superior to FBX for some simple cases. The cool point about glTF is that the same file holds a full scene, with multiple 3d objects, each of them with animation, and each of them with materials, and each material actually imports as a material graph, and with textures." Take a look and tell us what you think.

The Khronos Group will be at GDC & VRDC 2018. Be sure to mark us in your calendar for the Khronos Dev Day on March 19th in Moscone, West Hall, Room 3022. This years sessions are now posted and include WebGL, glTF, OpenXR and Vulkan. Be sure to book mark the Khronos GDC event page and checkout some of our other upcoming events and meet ups.

Codeplay has written up a detailed run through of how they how they ensure C++ fundamental types are translated correctly from SYCL code through to OpenCL, retaining their correct size and signedness.
If you're an application developer, this will help you learn a little about how SYCL works under the hood. If you're looking to implement SYCL, this will help you find a way to get the compiler to do your lifting for you.

While current generation Linux games with current Linux GPU drivers using the Vulkan API rather than OpenGL may not be significantly faster with higher-end hardware right, the impact of this newer Khronos graphics API tends to be more profound on lower-end hardware, especially when it comes to lightening the load on the CPU. Following recent Pentium vs. Ryzen 3 Linux gaming tests, Phoronix carried out some fresh benchmarks looking at OpenGL vs. Vulkan on the Ryzen 3 1200 quad-core CPU with NVIDIA and Radeon graphics.